January 31, 2013

We have a VM server go down which brought down a few FAH services (notably web site and backup AS), but it's back up. The stats viewing was unavailable during the outage, but the stats input to the db was unaffected.

Our sysadmins got the machine back up and all looks to be back in order.

December 10, 2012

We have had an unfilled spot in our GPU programming team for a few months and I'm happy to announce that we recently made a great new hire: Yutong Zhao.

Yutong completed his undergraduate degree in Math, Chemistry, and Biochemistry from the University of Toronto, and a Masters degree in Computational Chemistry from HKUST, focusing on GPU-powered clustering algorithms. Previously, he has also worked on projects such as FoldIt! Currently, he is the lead developer of the Folding@Home GPU core and aims to extend functionality while increasing maintainability. He also plays a key role on the OpenMM side, he works on devising parallel algorithms to speed up MD simulations. He also maintains a blog detailing some of his algorithms and problems on www.proteneer.com .

December 08, 2012

We've been working to fix two issues with GPU clients in FAH. Here's an update:

1) There was an issue with NVIDIA clients with G80 GPUs getting stuck in a core_outdated download infinite loop. This has now been resolved. This was caused when we stopped older projects which used core_11 (which the G80's were primarily running) and now the G80's are directed to more recent projects. However, with the ending of the old projects and the start of the new ones, that means G80 GPUs go to core_15, which has much more strict testing for GPU memory errors. Several donors have reported that these tests are failing with their boards. We are looking into whether this is an issue with our test or potentially that the boards are not capable of running the latest core. So, while the core_outdated loop issue appears now to be fixed, there is another unresolved issue which we are continuing to look into.

2) There was a second issue with ATI clients getting directed to servers running NV WU's. This error is also unresolved at the moment, but we have a handle on what's happening on our end and have a team working on it. I don't have any news here to report other than we can see the issue cause in our logs, which is the first step to fixing it.

We've been seeing donor reports of WU assignment issues for GPUs (WU's intended only for G80 GPUs going to Fermi and Kepler). We finished an AS patch yesterday, gave it a day of testing, then rolled it out this morning to address this issue. We generally don't like to roll out new AS code this quickly, but this time it seemed important to address this issue quickly. We hope that as of 7:30am pacific time, this issue is now addressed, but we'll be keeping an eye out during the day to see.

December 06, 2012

The unified GPU/SMP benchmarking scheme will be rolled out today on FAH. All the future GPU projects would now be benchmarked using the new scheme. Most of the existing GPU projects have been re-benchmarked to reflect the changes in the benchmarking scheme. We are still in the process of re-benchmarking some old projects assigned to ATI and G80 GPUs. The uniform benchmarking scheme significantly boosts the base points for all GPU projects. However, Quick Return Bonus for the GPU clients has not been introduced at this stage, but will be introduced once we work out an issue on our side. We would like to thank all the beta testers who participated in testing the unified benchmarking scheme.

December 03, 2012

Ken Dill, a long-standing leader in protein folding, just
published a beautiful review article about progress in the field. The main point is that what began as a
specific research question has now evolved into an entire field with numerous
research directions. It’s would be
difficult to provide a more eloquent explanation than Ken’s, so here are a few
excerpts from the article

“The protein-folding problem was first
posed about one half-century ago. The term refers to three broad questions: (i)
What is the physical code by which an amino acid sequence dictates a protein’s
native structure? (ii) How can proteins fold so fast? (iii) Can we devise a
computer algorithm to predict protein structures from their sequences?... computer simulations of the physical forces
in chemically detailed models have now achieved the accurate folding of small
proteins… What began as three questions
of basic science one half-century ago has now grown into the full-fledged research
field of protein physical science.”

Insights and achievements from
Folding@home are highlighted on a number of occasions throughout the article. So, congrats to all for helping to establish
this ever-growing field.

Also, there's a nice video about this online for those who are interested

November 28, 2012

We have been updating our internal accounting of stats for FLOPs for FAH. The major revamp has come from a better handling of the difference between a CPU and a core. Modern CPUs have multiple cores. Before the v7 client, it was common for donors to fold with multiple uni-processor clients, one for each core. Now, with v7 making SMP more easy to run, SMP is much more common. This means we need to keep track of CPUs and cores more explicitly. Our new serverstats page takes care of this and also updates for estimates for FLOPs across the board, but especially from GPUs.

November 20, 2012

One of our servers (VSP12) which runs multiple virtual servers (VSP12a through g) will be take down for maintenance in the afternoon (Nov 20, around 1:00 pm) and is planned to be back up later in the evening.

All the interfaces on this machine (Vsp12a,b,c,d,e,f,g with server addresses 171.67.108.58, 59, 60, 141, 142, 143, 144) hosting projects with ID in the range 8001-8067 will be affected. This includes several GPU3 and SMP A4 (multi+uniprocessor) projects. This server hosts a large number of current FAH projects but donors would be able to get work units from other servers with similar work units.